Eric Cantor loss kills immigration reform

Immigration reform is almost certainly dead on Capitol Hill this year.

Many top sources close to the issue privately acknowledged after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shocking defeat Tuesday night that the already uphill battle for immigration reform was dealt the knockout blow.

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Coming off President Barack Obama’s re-election, immigration reform was seen as an issue both parties could deal with quickly. Democrats wanted to deliver on promises made to their Latino backers and Republicans wanted to get the issue off the table to avoid reliving the electoral demographic nightmare of 2012.

But House GOP leaders have long said they wouldn’t bring up the Gang of Eight bill the Senate passed last year, and Cantor’s embrace of even piecemeal proposals was derided by opponent Dave Brat and tea party activists as “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.

Tuesday’s result is also likely to raise pressure from the left on Obama to use executive authority to act on deportations. The White House said recently that Obama had asked for a delay of his administration’s deportation review until the end of the summer – in an effort to give House Republicans space to act on a legislative overhaul.

“I don’t know what this means. I’m very confused,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who has been working behind the scenes to gain support for immigration reform, said of Cantor’s defeat in a phone interview. “It clearly adds a lot of confusion and uncertainty and that’s the last thing we need.”

Diaz-Balart, his voice clearly indicating that he was in shock over Cantor’s loss, had been increasingly optimistic on the chances of immigration reform this year. Now, he said he’ll take the next few days talking to his colleagues and assessing how they feel on the issue.

Cantor had been hit from both the left and right on immigration. Many advocates increasingly viewed him as the key obstacle within the House Republican leadership – though Cantor’s aides said the House majority leader supported fixing the immigration system, just through smaller-scale measures such as border security and legal status for young undocumented immigrants.

Immigration advocates Tuesday night were heavily critical of how Cantor had positioned himself on the issue. He distributed mailers that proudly proclaimed he was stopping an effort from Democrats to push “amnesty to give illegal aliens a free ride” – a direct response to Brat’s criticisms. Yet his camp stressed that he still supported immigration reform.

“Cantor misled his voters and they punished him,” said Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. He added that it was too early to tell whether his group will change its advocacy tactics on immigration, saying: “We’ll see how [Speaker John] Boehner reacts in the next couple of days.”

Jim Wallis, the founder of the Christian group Sojourners that has lobbied House Republicans on immigration reform, said bluntly: “Eric Cantor was not an ally of immigration reform.”

“At least as one person who is hoping and praying for immigration reform, I did not trust Eric Cantor to be on the right side,” Wallis said. “Now that he is gone, I am more hopeful that John Boehner can follow his own head and his own heart and do the right thing.”

Instead, advocates looked to the strategy employed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). In the other major primary of the night involving immigration, Graham – a member of the Senate Gang of Eight who relentlessly advocated for an overhaul – sailed through his primary, getting more than the 50 percent he needed to avoid a runoff.

Advocates pointed that Graham’s decisive victory should be what guides the influence of immigration in primaries – not Cantor’s.

“Tonight’s election shows the Republican Party has two paths it can take on immigration: The Graham path of showing leadership and solving a problem in a mainstream way, which leads to victory. Or the Cantor path of trying to play both sides, which is a path to defeat,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “Cantor’s defeat does not change the fundamental fact that Republicans will become a minority party if they don’t address our broken immigration system.”